holiday gifts

A passion for travelling often comes with an equal passion for tasting food from various cultures. Luckily, cookbooks are cheaper than airplane tickets.

Today I have two cookbook recommendations that are both authentically set in culinary traditions different–one definitely more distinctly–from ours.

The population of the United States has never been so obese and thanks in part to that frosted-tipped, sunglasses on the back of his head Food Network host never as self-conscious of its popular food culture. Happily, we have Serious Eats to be, well, more serious about covering America’s burger joints, old-time pizza parlous, and, yes, diners. (more…)

Throughout the early part of December 2011 I’m going to publish posts with my suggestions for cookbooks to give as gifts this year. I’ll summarise the suggestions here and organise them into categories.

If you buy the books through these links to Amazon I get a small commission but the percentage is the same across the board and Amazon pretty much covers the universe of possibilities for me to recommend. In other words, I don’t think that induces any bias but you can be the judge. Also, if you’re looking for anything on Amazon and type it into that search box in the right sidebar I get the same commission.

Cookbooks That Will be Spattered in Oil and Fish Sauce by Next Year

Almost all of the books I’ll be recommending for the foodster set have recipes in them and this is not to say that the recipes from the books in the other categories are less deserving of culinary attention. It’s just that if we’re being honest with ourselves we should admit that some cookbooks are published and bought for purposes other than cooking. (more…)

If you’ve been to a dinner party in 2011 and politely asked your (hipster) host about the recipes for a particular fried chicken or ssam course and his answer was a little too earnest chances are it came from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook. Or in some cases the entire point of the party was to serve and eat food from Momofuku. How do I know this? I’ve been that guy; I’ve cooked those meals.

What’s going to replace the yellow book in 2012? Good question.

It’s dessert version, Momofuku Milk Bar is getting the full, giant-stack treatment from bookstores (and will likely sell well) but I didn’t like reading it nearly as much. I found Christina Tosi’s writing style less comfortably enjoyable than Chang’s but I can see that if desserts are your thing–especially ones with classic American flavours–this will be more up your alley. (more…)